Marketing is all about message optimization because your content is always unfinished. So is everyone else’s. Some content is better than others, and some executions are really great. Your goal isn’t to make your communications perfect but to keep improving them regularly. This gets easier when you have some guidance.

Building Suspense

One of the most common challenges for novice content writers is ordering sentences and paragraphs properly so the information keeps building rather than backtracking and covering the bare spots. When the writer thinks ahead, anxious to get the main point out there, he or she attempts to enhance the message with subsequent details and examples after revealing the main attraction. This makes sense at first but has an anticlimactic effect. The reader may end up bored or confused rather than informed and engaged.

First Things First

Good writers are engineers. They must understand foundations and successive building blocks needed to support a finished edifice for the edification of their audience. They begin by acknowledging their audience as students and their role as the teacher (and builder of ideas). They get to work laying the groundwork that entices the reader to witness the whole edifice take shape and have meaning. They put themselves in the novice’s shoes and know the right path to understanding.

Your Two Choices

The “make or buy decision” comes up all the time. You can “save money” by the do-it-yourself method (while forgoing money-earning time). You can handle the tedious, arduous and sometimes frustrating work of a trained professional, or you can just hire a pro and let him or her have at it while you get important (and profitable) tasks accomplished. When you tell a real pro to “have at it” they take your challenge seriously. Pros aim to please.

Don’t you just love taking possession of a purchase that meets or exceeds your expectations? In my industry, for example, a great new article, website design or advertisement is truly thrilling when first seen by the client and will tend to have a similar impact on it’s intended target audience, especially if they happen to be earnestly shopping different brands.

How optimal are your communications?

You and I both know they’re not perfect. How much better must they be right now in order to reach your marketing goals? Is there one communications area you can focus on that will raise your company’s image in the market? Which building blocks of relevant meaning need to be logically arranged for your market’s benefit?

Remember that life is all about continuously getting better as nobody can attain perfection. But think about another word – optimal. Optimal essentially means the best you can get from what’s available. So get to work on your message optimization. Your audience wants to understand exactly where you’re going. Lead them logically and they will at least be curious. Some will follow your lead, and to those new customers, your information is successfully optimized.

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Every online platform except for one can modify, add to, or even ban your company messages. Your brand can be all over the place; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google, YouTube, directories, blogs, guest landing pages, etc.

You can maximize your presence in all these online media and the brand experience visitors have will be limited and in many cases disappointing. Why? Because these spaces don’t belong to you and you are being used by them, not the other way around!

The hard truth of social media marketing: Your company information and, very likely, personal employee information are actually the product of social media companies, sold through advertising to other marketers. Your data (which is cumulatively collected with each login) belongs to them as much as it belongs to you. And if you want more than 5 or 6 people to see your posts, you must pay to have it distributed, even to your own friends, followers and connections!

So where is this one place on the Internet that you control completely? Hopefully, it’s the one in which you invest the most time and money – Your Website.

Your own Company Website gets top priority in all matters concerning online marketing. You can totally customize the experience for your specific target audiences. Social platforms, search engines and other channels are fine for distributing Your Website content, but they are not where your brand resides. Metaphorically, you should be entertaining your customers right inside your Home rather than having a quick chat inside a Starbucks.

Content Marketing at Work

I suggest getting busy writing about how you solve specific problems better than your competition. Take pictures and shoot video! At a minimum, hunt down some appropriate stock images for your campaign messages (just know how to choose them).

My company website has been producing higher quality leads in recent months following a content marketing campaign that resides, guess where?  Right where your eyes are focused now. This blog.

Questions? Ask a content marketing expert at
Chuck Sink Link.

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Whenever you hear or read the phrase, “marketing best practices” think of it as a series of tactics that have worked well for a collection of businesses at a recent point in time in a specific industry.

In my own industry, digital marketing, I’ve been seeing a saturation of self-marketing that looks dangerously similar among competing firms. It tends to focus on selling a defined process that includes Web Design, SEO, SEM, Social Media, Email and lead generation/sales funnels. The very same process tends to be applied to very different companies so effectiveness varies from one client to another.

I recently made the mistake of referring to my company’s approach to website development as a “best practice.” While we can be the best website services choice for many businesses, calling ours the “best practice” excludes too many other possibilities influenced by dynamic marketing factors such as vertical industries, culture, demographics, technologies, innovations and trends.

Coming full circle, this is why I love our own approach to website design, development and maintenance. It lets those who know their markets best (our clients) better control the messages and their targeted online distribution.

Best-for-Brand Practice

It would probably be better to call our web development methodology a “best-for-brand practice.” Your website should be designed and maintained around your brand – your audience preferences and their preferred business style. It’s all based on user experience (UX).

Does every business want their website to function as a lead generation machine or a sales funnel? Clearly, the answer is no, yet so many digital marketing agencies seem to push this model as THE best practice in online marketing.

Before you decide on the best-for-brand website development approach for your own company, ask some basic sales questions:

• Are you selective concerning the new customers your firm wants to attract?
• Do you want qualified leads to call your phone number so you can better guide them?
• Do customers require product demos with multi-phase sales cycles?
• Is your product or service easy to order online?
• Should prospects download your content and subscribe to news & events? Why?
• Are you looking for more Social Media interaction? How will that help you?
• Do you need a steady stream of inbound leads to keep an inside sales team busy and productive?

Each of these and other sales & service needs can benefit from a strategically compatible website design and maintenance plan that caters to audience preferences. Our advice is to carefully consider the nuances that make your brand and customer experience one-of-a-kind and design a customized User Experience around it.

If now or in the future, you are thinking about your company’s next move regarding its website, we invite you to our new Website Services Page to learn about a fresh air approach to managing your website and online marketing campaigns.

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